


Hang 'Em High

by rodeojester



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Alcohol, Blackwatch Reaper | Gabriel Reyes, Deadlock McCree, Death, Guns, M/M, Trans Jesse McCree, Vaping, Violence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-11-05
Updated: 2016-11-05
Packaged: 2018-08-29 06:53:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,647
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8479498
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rodeojester/pseuds/rodeojester
Summary: You can feel it in the ground before you see the car round the corner.
  
  You quickly get to your feet and dust yourself off. Standing up was harder than you expected it to be.
  
  You should’ve been keeping track of how much you’d been drinking more closely, especially considering the reasons you’re standing here in the first place.
  
  Reason number one, of course, is to meet the dipshit fed or whatever who’s either a massive idiot that’s trying to set up the Deadlock Gang or a massive idiot that’s about to hand you guys the score of the century right before you knock him off.

An incredibly self indulgent fill-in-the-blanks of the missing parts in the Blackwatch backstory.





	1. PROLOGUE: International Arms Traffic Blues

**Author's Note:**

> _My love is like a powder keg_   
>  _My love is like a powder keg in the corner of an empty warehouse_   
>  _Somewhere just outside of town_   
>  _About to burn down_   
> 

You’re having a hard time remembering your own name.

You blink your sore, bleary eyes and slowly ease into consciousness in an unfamiliar room. It takes a moment for you to register that you can’t properly blink your left eye on account of your swollen, bleeding eyelid. It takes another moment for you to start feeling the blunt trauma bruising not only in your eye, but in your shoulder, your upper arms, the small of your back, your stomach, your chest, your shins, and at this point it’s too difficult for you to be able to draw the line between one injury and another. You reflexively attempt to clench your hands into fists, but stop short when you’re struck with a sickening stab of pain from two, or three, of the fingers on your right hand. You cry out, and are suddenly jolted to the side. Someone tells you to shut up. You realize that you’re sitting in a chair, and you guess that they kicked it. Whoever it was didn’t like the noises you were making. You hear them start talking to someone else in the room, but the words blur and you can’t parse them into anything understandable. You don’t make any attempt to stand up, not that you could with your arms belted to the chair. The belts weren’t built into the chair itself; these restraints were a creative improvisation. One of the belts has a buckle that proudly displays the flag of New Mexico, and the words “Land of Enchantment”. 

This is your first visit to this state. Not going so hot, you guess. Getting here wasn't your first ride in a helicopter, but you still haven’t quite gotten used to them. You were half ready to blow chunks when you arrived just in time to hear explosion that tore apart the rail supports, though still too far away to see the train riding them come toppling down to the ground below. One of those fallen carts contained a one hundred megaton thermonuclear bomb, but that wasn't what you were there for. It’s still blowing your mind that the plan for this mission involved using a real, live nuclear weapon as the honeypot. Guess it had to be as real as possible to not raise any red flags. You don’t really know any details beyond that at your rank. While the majority of the operatives sent on this mission were there to take the weaponsrunners attempting to steal the bomb dead or alive, your particular squad’s job was simpler: guarantee the safety of the Blackwatch commander and secure his exit. Guy decided to take on the riskiest job himself, as usual. Doesn’t trust anyone else to be competent enough. You know you certainly wouldn’t be, considering your current position. You were selected for an elite international covert ops task force because you were in the top 1% of your thousands of peers at the academy, and here you are about to die strapped to a kitchen chair next to a pool table. 

More people enter the room. They’ve all got guns. Most of them are pointed at one man. Your vision’s started to go again and your cognitive power is failing you so you’re having a hard time telling anyone apart, but when he’s close enough thatyou can feel his breath on your face the realization dawns that the man with all the weapons aimed in his direction is the commander you were here for. He stares down at you. He doesn’t say anything. The men with their guns pointed at him are saying quite a lot of things but the noise just washes over you as if you were hearing them from underwater. There’s another man, you notice, off in the corner. He’d followed them in a few seconds behind, and doesn’t seem like he wants to be there any more than you do. Your commander seems surprisingly calm by comparison. He puts his gun to your head.

You feel the muzzle of his shotgun pressed against your temple. The cold metal is soothing on your wounds. Your one good eye strains to look up at him, but he's looking elsewhere. You want to tell yourself that there’s no way he’s going to pull the trigger but your body already knows that you’re going to die. Your throat begins to enact the complex process of swallowing one last time but doesn’t get the chance to finish before the bullet smashing through your brain matter extinguishes your ability to operate any of your muscles, and also your ability to continue living.


	2. A Little Less Talk

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _It looked like a place_   
>  _To find some satisfaction_   
>  _With a little less talk_   
>  _And a lot more action_

You’re leaning against the outside wall of Big Earl’s, and to a casual observer from the early 20th century, it might appear as though you were smoking a real cigar. However, said observer would not be thinking ahead to the advanced vaping technology of the future. No tobacco smoke here; just a convenient nicotine delivery system that happens to make you look super cool. Good thing about the lack of real tobacco considering the way that crap stains teeth, being that you consider your pearly whites to be one of your best features. You also consider your facial hair to be one of your best features despite the fact that many have vocally disagreed. You’re in your mid twenties, and despite the fact that you otherwise look your age, you have the beard of a particularly dedicated (or particularly lazy) highschooler. You’re a little behind on the scruff game since you started second puberty a bit late. 

It’s hot out. Sunny, too. Not a particularly unique thing to say about the weather in New Mexico. You’re staying in the shade under the gas station awning because you didn’t wear your hat today. You don’t have your hat on because you’ve got your headphones on, which are big and clunky and impossible to make work with anything else also on your head. Your headphones are that unwieldy because they’re the only ones you could find that were old enough to work with your portable CD walkman. You’re listening to music because you’ve had to stand around in the heat by yourself for a while, and you’re using a decades-outdated music player because you wholeheartedly believe that the sound quality and overall listening experience is better, and also because you can do whatever you want without having to justify those particular choices to anybody, thanks. 

You’re listening to Toby Keith’s self titled debut album. Not his best, you think, but still has some classics on it. You’re fond of how he looks on the album cover because of his sort of awkward boyish stance and long, flowing hair. Entirely incidentally, you’ve been growing out your hair to a similar length, though it’s too thick and dark to resemble his aesthetically ideal fluffy blonde mullet, which you think is a damn shame. It’s pretty funny seeing him that young in the picture, since he’d yet to pupate into the thickset country man that you admittedly got a bit of a crush on when you first saw his face while going through your inherited CD collection. You’re pretty much over him now. It’s been at least a few months since you last thought about kissing that poster of him you have on the wall of your bedroom. You like to tell yourself it’s been at least a few months. 

You “put out” your “cigar” and shove it into your shirt pocket while the song playing on your walkman switches from Should’ve Been a Cowboy to He Ain’t Worth Missing. This is the fourth or fifth time today you’ve started the album over after listening through the whole thing. At this point even you have to admit you’re getting a little sick of Toby’s crooning Oklahoma pipes. Feeling a bit guilty about it, you hit the stop button and slide your headphones off your ears. Without the distraction of the music, you can suddenly feel the sweat dripping off your exposed skin and pooling under your clothes. You close your eyes and slide down the wall to ground, landing pretty roughly, then blindly paw around for the case of beer you know you put somewhere next to you. You rifle through the empty cans until you feel one that’s heavy enough to be full and still a bit cooler than the air around you, then pluck it out, pop it open and chug at least half of it (to be more accurate, a good portion of it sort of missed your mouth and dribbled down your chin onto your kerchief, which you wear more for convenient liquid absorption than anything else). 

You’re thinking about how inconvenient the timing was of you pumping more testosterone into your system and travelling further south was considering your inability to cope with producing this much sweat all at once when you hear a distant car that sounds like it’s getting closer. More specifically, you hear the distinct rumble of car speaker systems when the subwoofer is jacked up so much that people outside the vehicle can’t hear anything but bass. There’s absolutely no way to determine what particular variety of song is producing that sound beyond firm knowledge of it going hard as fuck. You can feel it in the ground before you see the car round the corner. You quickly get to your feet and dust yourself off. Standing up was harder than you expected it to be. You should’ve been keeping track of how much you’d been drinking more closely, especially considering the reasons you’re standing here in the first place. Reason number one, of course, is to meet the dipshit fed or whatever who’s either a massive idiot that’s trying to set up the Deadlock Gang or a massive idiot that’s about to hand you guys the score of the century right before you knock him off. Number two is that you got put on “standing around waiting for the asshole to show up and doing basic threat assessment before either sending him off to your bosses or sending him off to the big rodeo in the sky” duty because you were too “reckless” on your last assignment. Does it really matter if you unnecessarily initiated a highway shootout with the cops when you were the one that cleaned up that mess yourself already? Their wagon spun off into a ditch after you took out the driver, your guys got away, everything was fine. This punishment, you think, is complete overkill. And if the guy’d taken any longer to get here, more time in this heat might have literally killed you. 

The mysterious stranger pulls up in front of the station and. after a moment’s pause, rolls down the passenger side window that’s between you. The noise blasting out of it can now be identified as some sort of 00’s-era rock that you’re vaguely familiar with, accompanied by a very welcome blast of his air conditioning. You can’t quite see what the driver looks like with how bright the sun is and the dark shadows in the car. You squint at him and toss him a salute that turned into an awkward wave halfway through because what on earth would possess you to ever salute someone? You attempt to confidently slip the offending hand into one of the front pockets of your remarkably short denim cutoffs in the hopes that you can pass off that strange gesture as something cool that you definitely do all of the time, and take a long breath to recuperate before speaking. Said pocket also happens to be the one closest to the gun holster hanging at your hip. No matter how much you might otherwise embarrass yourself, it’s always easy to make people take you seriously when you’ve got a loaded weapon on your person.  
  
“Howdy, stranger. What brings you ‘round here?”  
Your words came out at an uncomfortable half-yell due to your fight against the volume of his music. Only after you finished did he elect to turn it down to background noise levels. He leans over the passenger seat towards you, but it’s still too dark in there to get an idea of what he looks like.  
“You the one I’m supposed to be meeting?”  
“Depends,” you reply, pausing to pointedly adjust the belt of your holster, “on if your trunk is sardine packed full of feds waitin’ to jump out once we let you past the gates or not. ‘Fraid if that’s the case then I’m definitely not your man.”  
  
At this, the stranger grumbles and opts to finally get out of his car. Your first glimpse of him in direct sunlight is of his broad, impressively toned back, which despite his car’s A/C is already glistening with sweat that makes his thin black tank top cling to his skin. As he walks around the car towards you, you further note about the large amount of visible skin on his upper body that there really isn’t a square inch that isn’t covered in scars or what appear to be hand-poked black line tattoos, all faded to various degrees. You also note that he’s got a pair of threateningly large guns on him. You’re talking genuine A-grade firearms. Guy’s equipped some pretty serious weapons is what you’re getting at here. You really can’t emphasize enough how much heat this dude is packing. You force yourself to make eye contact once you realize you’ve been spending way too long silently staring at any part of him other than his face He is… boy he’s just as much handsome as he is not conveying a single readable emotion right now. You flash him a grin.  
“On second thought,” you add, continuing your scrutinous visual threat assessment, “if I misread the sort of meetin’ you were here for, I might well be your man anyways.”  
This line makes him stop in his tracks, his feet meeting the edge of the awning’s shadow. No reaction from his face yet.  
“Oh?” he responds after a moment. He’s waiting to see where you’re going with this.  
“I gotta say,” you brazenly continue, “common courtesy to let a guy know when and where you’re gonna be showin up. I ain’t discreet but I’d prefer somethin a bit more lowkey than high noon in front of Big Earl’s.”  
You let that embarrassing garbage just hang in the air. If it were physically possible for you to be any warmer or sweatier in this weather, this would be the moment for that. The man stares you down and slowly crosses his arms in front of his chest.  
“If you’re talking common courtesy,” he begins, “it’s usually considered basic decorum not to lie about your height on your profile. You sure don’t look 6’1” to me.”  
There’s a flicker of a smirk on his face and you feel the tension in your stomach dissolve instantly.  
“I ain’t wearin my tallest boots today, so sue me. Counted ‘em in the number ‘cause I figured it’d be more accurate to give guys an idea of the whole package. Those suckers ain’t comin’ off, you get me?”  
“Ah, so the gas station isn’t an option for the sake of keeping that expensive leather off the dirty bathroom floor. I got you, shit’s a bitch to clean.”  
“Bathrooms are pretty spotless actually, main reason I wouldn’t recommend ‘em is more the content of the walls. If you wanted my number, for instance, I’d rather you get it from me directly than from anythin’ written in sharpie in there.”  
  
The phone in your back pocket begins to buzz and it startles you out of your train of thought. Guess you almost forgot what your job was here. You ignore it for now; you’ll get to business soon enough.  
“The name’s Jesse McCree, by the way,” you add.  
Your name’s Jesse McCree, by the way.


End file.
